Why People Think

Motivation for Writing the Paper What an Information System Is, and Why Is It Important to Know This : Why I Give Lectures and Seminars

The second feature of any talk I give is the purpose of my bothering to perform at all. When I ask my colleagues the purpose of a lecture, they often give some dreadfully dull responses. My view is as follows: a lecture is an opportunity to take a group of people on a journey of my choice; on the journey, I tell a story; if at the end of the journey people are still listening to my story, I kno...

Control over Anger and Aggression: Why Mean People may not be as Mean as you Think

(Why) do I think what you think? Epistemic social tuning and implicit prejudice.

This research examines whether people who experience epistemic motivation (i.e., a desire to acquire knowledge) came to have implicit attitudes consistent with the apparent beliefs of another person. People had lower implicit prejudice when they experienced epistemic motivation and interacted with a person who ostensibly held egalitarian beliefs (Experiments 1 and 2). Implicit prejudice was not...

Competition and wellbeing

Drawing on individual data from the World Values Surveys, this paper estimates the relation between individual feelings about competition and self‐reported happiness. People who think competition is good are associated to the same (high) level of happiness as do people who think competition is harmful. This finding is different than and complements previous research which shows a positive or ne...

The Health and Wealth of Nations

People who live in richer countries live longer than people who live in poor countries. Over the last century and half, or perhaps longer, income and longevity have increased together in the now rich countries, so that people got healthier as they got wealthier. Within both rich and poor countries, people who are richer live longer. Why is there such a close correlation between wealth and healt...

Why Do People Move Their Eyes When They Think ?

The saccadic eye movements that people make when thinking have been largely ignored in the eye-movement literature. Nevertheless, there is evidence that such eye movements are systematically related to internal thought processes. On average, people move their eyes about twice as often when searching through long-term memory as they do when engaged in tasks that do not require such search. This ...